5 Lessons I’ve Learned From Running Twitter Contest

Running a Twitter contest is one of the most effective ways to increase your brand awareness amongst the audience. It is also a great way to enhance the bond between you and your current and future customers while increasing your Twitter social signals (followers, shares, retweets, and likes). The contests can be anything from taking photos, making videos, sharing the post, etc. The good thing about twitter contest for startups and businesses is the most of the Twitter users can hardly resist joining the contest when all they have to do is just hit the share, like, or follow button.

In preparing the Twitter Contest for your business, you might be confused on how to start. I didn’t have any idea about the Twitter contest at first. But after I learned from multiple sources, I came to conclude that actually there are top 5 lessons to learn to get the Twitter Contest properly. Although there are tons of lessons that I’ve learned, I’d like to highlight these because you can’t overlook these aspects if you want your Twitter Contest to be successful.

Get the Decent Prize

One of the very first things that you have to do is to find the most appropriate price for your specific Twitter Contest. The prize can be your product or a service which has such good value for your customers. The bigger the prize, the bigger the hype that you will draw for your audience. Take your time to research on what your current and future customers like the most. If necessary, you could make some pollings to see the results come out. Then you might want to spend some money to get the great prize.

Terms and Conditions

What has been overlooked by many brands is to set the terms and conditions properly. Your audiences must know the terms and conditions so that they will maximize your Twitter contest. It is important that your contest respects the guidelines. The terms and conditions must be explained clearly to the audiences.

With these, your contest’s participants will know how the contest system works, how the winner will be selected, and how the prize will be granted. It is also to know who is the right candidates to enter the contest. Also, these terms and conditions make it very clear about your company’s position as the event holder so that the public know about what it is. You could post the terms on your Twitter bio, website, or other sites of yours. Not to mention that you must be clear about the start and end times of the contest. Ideally, 5 to 7 days windows are enough times for gathering the mass to participate the contest.

Although Twitter has more than 140 characters limit now, it is still not enough to describe your promotion and other related information. So, you may consider putting the content together on the third party site like Just Paste It, Gdrive, or so. Consider having a tracking service for your URL. I like to use Bit.ly since it is very great for tracking. You could use your favorite link shortener though.

Select the Content

Your Twitter contest can be helped with different types of content in many forms: audio, video, text, photos, etc. You need to narrow down your choice so that you can focus on your most working content. Let’s get back to the point number 1. You might be selecting the prize for your customers. That can be your own product, service, or anything else. The thing is that you don’t know what the customers like to see. In most cases, you could only use your twitter’s tweet. Twitter just doubled the limit of characters to 280. That means you could write a longer catchy phrase. In my opinion, 100 characters are more than enough to engage your audience. But if you could make it denser in approaching 280 characters, that will be great. You may need to learn few slang or coined words of Twitter contest such as “RT to Win” or “Follow Us & RT to Win”, and so on. These will add more spices in your Twitter contest invitation.

Selecting the winner

You’ll need to select the winner once the contest is over. Assuming that you have mentioned the date of the winner announcement, you need to get work in the time being. Keep in mind to thank the participants for following the contest. In this occasion, every participant should be holding the number assigned to them. The good thing about running an online contest nowadays is that you don’t have to select the winner manually. You can rely on automatic system like Randomizer which helps you to select the number that is assigned to your winner. It is the system that lets you choose the winner as fair as possible. Once you get the number, you can check whether or not the participant meets the criteria and follows the rules. If he or she passes the check, you should announce the winner immediately.

Decide the Twitter contest from your business goals

Often the Twitter contest is not relevant to certain goal. That explains why many businesses are not interested in doing this. The key here is to make the contest which is relevant to your goal. For instance, if you want to increase your Twitter followers, then you could just conduct the Sweepstakes. If you want to increase your sales, you could offer coupon as the prize, so that your customer will purchase right away. If you strive for social networking engagement, then you could use the user-generated content, such as video contest, photo contest, and so on.

These are what I’ve learned from running Twitter contest for 2 years. Although it does not cover anything, at least it tells you the big picture of what you can tweak to make your Twitter contest more effective. Have a nice try.